At Microsoft Build 2020 last month, Microsoft announced new features for its IoT platform, Azure Digital Twins.
Today, Microsoft says these new features are now available in preview. With today’s announcement, users can now apply their domain expertise on top of Azure Digital Twins and design and build comprehensive digital models of whole environments.
Users of the platform will now also be able to gain insights, optimize their operations, reduce costs and improve customer experiences.
With the new preview of Azure Digital Twins, users can now employ Microsoft’s Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) to tailor their twins to meet their specific needs. Real-world environments can be created from the connected twins too. By using properties, telemetry events, components and relationships, DTDL defines how twins are connected into rich knowledge graphs.
DTDL is also used for other Azure IoT services, including IoT Plug and Play and Azure Time Series Insights.
Further, a live execution environment enables users to enliven their digital twins and create an up-to-date digital representation of their environment using data from IoT and other data sources. When it comes to extracting data insights from the live execution environment, Azure Digital Twins does so using a powerful query system.
The Azure IoT Hub can be used to connect assets like IoT and IoT Edge devices to Azure Digital Twins too. Not only that, but the hub can also be used to monitor and manage assets at scale. Additionally, by using the Azure Digital Twins REST APIs, Azure Digital Twins is able to unlock actionable insights.
To build a complete end-to-end solution, Azure Digital Twins is able to integrate with other Azure services. With Azure Digital Twins, users can now send data downstream to services supporting Event Hubs, Event Grid or Service Bus. Azure Digital Twins can also be integrated with services like Azure Synapse Analytics, Logic Apps, Power BI and Azure Time Series Insights.
